softest butch forger: poetic rituals and scores
(A score of poem recitals sung and shouted)
(SUNG)
Softest butch forger
Softest butch lover
Softest butch forger
Softest butch lover
Softessst buuutch loover (dragging) x 3
Softest butch looover
Loooover
Looover
(RECITED)
(The lines are sung while I whip a wall with an installed chain assembled to the wall. The
construction was already there as part of the architecture. I bounce the chain wrapped in sheer
mesh neon green fabric. The fabric moves as a softer skin of the hard chain like a ghost.
The lines are sung as an evocation of Frida Belifante’s ghost and her own ghosts)
(RECITED)
(I walk around in the room reading for the audience. Sometimes I stop in front of them and go
back into the sung lines, and then back into the recited parts. I walk slowly, determined to
awaken the ghosts in the room and in the distant collective memory)
You passed your own mother unrecognized
Was it a cover or was it truth?
Hiding in suits, walking confidently in worlds that belonged not only to men, yet they dominated,
destroyed, oppressed
You swayed all of us
Maternal heart stoned
post-war grievings
You left the cello for resistance
Death was upon you every hour
You ran to the sun
Because Belinfante was outer warrior
Protector of your kin,
magnificent demeanor,
Forger of the future
Of those persecuted
Sensible large hands that cared, played and conspirated
Devotee taurean sensuous lover
Married for deep sapio-friendship
even when doom was imminent
For you, held hands and faces of unusual femme and dyke lustful admirers
Bursting through unapologetic desires
Debutching skirts, never the hair
Kept woman
As the only one in worlds where men kept the feminine away
Running underground orchestras
the alias viola da gamba derisively was written in pamphlets
Unstoppable you lived even when decay slowly crept in
Even in your 290 times x x x x x x days of mourning,
Neither the viola nor the cello could serenade you to create any longer
Yet you sprung back
Your hands in the air drawing vibration
Interruption of evil
Bravery of love
and joy
(LOUDER, MUCH LOUDER)
(I keep walking in the room, settling down in front of audience members and at times lingering there next
to them. My voice carries tension, searching for collective anger echoed through remembering Frida’s
revolutionary escape and paving the path for her/their comrades to escape by forgery of new identities.)
All i wanted to be was the softest of lovers
Pleasure is in my chart
All i wanted to be was an eternal child playing the cello with no score
Why we endure all this pain
Why we endure insane
Why we commit to drain
Neutrality is a lie
Universality doesn’t exist
We committed these crimes
Either by watching or holding guns
Or building chambers
(SUNG)
Softest butch forger
Softest butch lover
Softest butch forger
Softest butch lover
Softessst buuutch loover (dragging) x 3
Softest butch looover
Loooover
Looover
This text was originally published at Szwedzka 8 The Scents of Queer Resistance: Notes on Witchcraft and Queer Magic conjured by Vala Foytin and published by Art Hub Copenhagen in 2024. The score-poem was originally created for the performance work Queer Magick Intervention with Vala Foytin, Wojtek Wojtek Blecharz, Phyllis Akinyi and myself for the Musik Installationen festival in Nuremberg, Germany, in 2022.
Written in 2022 and edited in 2023.
